Data Processing Joins Fight to Treat Cancer
Laboratory technicians battling cancer want to improve diagnosis and treatment of the disease. But they are drowning in data from modern biological techniques. New Web-based software – validated in three European oncology hospitals – can extract potentially life-saving knowledge from such data in minutes.
(PRWEB) April 8, 2005 -- In Europe, cancer is the second cause of death;
worldwide it accounts for 23.5 per cent of all deaths. The race to beat this
disease increasingly depends on groundbreaking bioinformatics research. Welcome
as they are, the various techniques being developed in this field create massive
amounts of data.
“Bioinformatics faces several challenges,” says
Philippe Boutruche, coordinator of the IST project HKIS. “Life scientists need
to access data from many different sources and in a variety of formats.” He adds
that they lack standards to cross all this data, which cover everything from
human DNA to genomes, and may spend weeks doing this manually.
An
integrated software platform
Under HKIS, the five partners developed an
integrated software platform for biological and biomedical data processing in
cancerology. “It was built around Amadea, software used by banks and marketers
for processing, crossing and transforming data. We saw its potential for
handling the huge volumes of patient data generated from cancer-research
techniques.”
The basic interactive platform is just 20 MB in size. Aimed
at medical and biological professionals, it can connect to all data types saved
in any form or structure. It can integrate and analyse new data sources from
public and private databases much faster than more labour-intensive
solutions.
The platform needs no programming, can be accessed on the
Internet and may be used by people with different expertise levels. Thanks to a
cache memory management system and special algorithms, it provides graphical
output for each analysis stage in real time, even if data is stored on another
server.
“We want to provide doctors, bioinformaticians and clinicians
with a common environment to build data-driven experiments,” says Boutruche.
“The project’s platform is homogeneous, so there is no need to export or
configure data from one format to another. Being integrated, it allows a
continuous workflow with raw data saved in XML format. Users can run statistical
mining or algorithms, which may show why the genes of some patients are more
susceptible to cancer.”
Trials prove successful
Successful trials were
conducted in 2003 in specialist cancer hospitals in the Ulm Medicine University,
the Curie Institute and the European Oncology Institute. Two of them used real
medical data from their own databases, while the third focused on data mining.
“Our platform helped to define some predictive diagnostic genes for identifying
genes of interest in bladder and pancreas cancer,” notes the
coordinator.
He believes the project’s technology could benefit a variety
of other medical and biology domains. Among them are genetic diseases,
therapeutic targets and drug discovery, genotyping and biotechnologies in
general. Others include the management of genetic databases, where the software
could enable quality assessment and automation.
By mid-2005, the partners
will have a commercial product for biology labs, adding a specialised bio-pack
to the original software. This pack will integrate the project’s major results,
including the ability to access data from different databases and to upgrade the
platform.
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Contact: Tara Morris,
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/4/prweb226119.htm